There are two aspects to knowing God: knowing God in general and knowing God specifically.
Without knowing God in a general manner, i.e., knowing that God is supreme above all creation and controls all, there is no point for Moses to perform miracles, because one might think that it is either a natural phenomenon or an act of sorcery.
This is very relevant in our age, because even though we have experienced so many miracles in the Land of Israel, as the Lubavitcher Rebbe would say, literally a miracle every moment, still they have not made the impact they should because they are not recognized as miracles. We are lacking even this general knowledge of God.
Still, the final goal is to know God not in this general sense, but in a particular and specific manner. The Zohar says that this last stage of knowing God was only attained at the end of the 40 years in the wilderness, when God gave us a knowing heart.
It learns this from the verse, “You shall know today and insert into your heart that Havayah is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, there is none other.”
Bringing knowledge of God into the heart in this manner constitutes the particular aspect of the commandment to know God. The purpose of the entire Torah and the commandments is to bring a person to this particular knowledge.
